No more half-measures. No more postponing.
I snatch up a bag of off-white powder and hurry into the kitchen, emptying it into a glass of milk, stirring with a spoon until it dissolves.
Melissa must have heard me coming, but she’s all out of fight. Her head hangs limply, eyes glassy when I grab her chin and tilt it up. Snot and spittle make her lower face glisten in the light of the bare bulb above our heads.
“Drink.”
Her eyes slowly shift to the glass in my hand. “What is it?”
“Strawberry milk, same as always.”
“It’s…it’s not pink.”
I lick my lips. I’ve been keeping her pliant with tiny doses of the same pink cocaine I drugged her with on Sunday.
“Ran out of syrup.”
“I don’t…it wasn’t sweet…was it?” she whispers, a tear racing down her cheek as she shakes her head as if she were desperately trying to remember. That would be the ketamine. Her short-term memory is as unreliable as a dissociative episode.
“You want out?” I crouch a little, bringing my head down to hers. “Drink.”
Her lips quiver, before she lets out a strangled sob. “Someone’s gonna catch you one day, you sick?—“
Her furious words cut off when I grab her hair and yank back her head. When her mouth opens for a gasp of pain, I tip the glass.
Milk splashes as she splutters, but when I press the rim of the glass to her lips she drinks, glaring up at me with malevolent, bloodshot eyes.
More milk spills down her chin, over her throat, soaking into the collar of the dress she’s been wearing for days, but not enough to make this dose any less lethal.
I watch the white runnels pour down her skin.
And I think of Sybil.
How she’d sometimes fumble with her glass when she was reading at the dinner table, too interested in her book to look at what she was doing. How her milk would spill, invisible against the white tablecloth, and how all Evelyn would do is ‘tsk.’
Christ. To this day, I can still hear that sound—the promise of a disproportionate amount of suffering. Not right away. But later, when we least expected it.
Evelyn loved delaying our punishments until we thought she’d forgotten.
She never forgot.
Just like I’ll never forget.
Melissa is still heaving in air as I climb the stairs, close the door. I hear a faint scream through the soundproofing, but it must be my imagination.
If it weren’t for the glass in my hand, the spilled milk soaking through my sleeve, I’d have convinced myself this wasalljust my imagination.
Agony Hollow, Haven, Kai…all just figments of my disturbed mind.
If fucking only.
I tip the glass against my lips, smiling when a bitter drop paints my mouth. I have more. I could make another glass.
For me.
The glass falls from my hand, bouncing on the carpet at my feet.
I slam my fist into the wall.
